When her girl body hit the water deep in the gorge where the river sliced through rock as if through a vein, disappearing with a smack that echoed through the stillness only to surface silent, bob motionless on the water, we felt relief.

We didn’t believe her when she threatened to jump because everyone knows Truth or Dare is for spilling secrets. Like how Tessa liked Billy except when he talked. Or Tanya said Austin was actually a bad kisser compared to the rest of us when we practiced together. We walked to the river to sit in circles, complain about math class and menstrual cramps, braiding daisies into chains as trapped as we felt in our one stoplight town.

Meghan was a girl destined for hurt. We already knew, like all her secrets, how her father slapped the smile from her face if it reminded him too much of her mother run off to the next town over to start a new family, or how her cousin pawed at her budding breasts during family BBQs and no one said a thing, the adults too tired from working at the stockyard—hitting cattle in the skull with an electric rod and watching, bored, as the bodies fell—to want anything but sitting with a Budweiser on a Saturday. 

Meghan believed a body was for leaping headfirst into whatever presented itself, like how she let the history teacher Mr. McDonnell pick her up at recess, his hands around her tiny waist, fascination on his face. Or how she never ate because people praised her smallness, her vertebrae like guppies trying to jump out of her skin.

We made games to save her. We held sleepovers at our houses so she could escape her own: dance contests under strobe lights, temporary tattoos to one another’s hips, tracing the lengths of each other’s bodies with markers on sheets of butcher paper and coloring ourselves in as we wanted to be seen. Meghan’s was always a mermaid, flashing fins and tail arcing up and away. We held meetings at lunch, far from the basketball court where McDonnell hovered under the net. We made games to eat, passing goldfish crackers around to signify whose turn it was to speak, though she never ate, just crushed it to dust between her restless fingers when she shared her latest adventure—stealing a tube of red Wet N Wild, leaving her kiss streaming down some boy’s throat like a scream. 

The gorge was a place for girls, which is why we liked it. Hidden and lush, wet and secret, cattails brushed up against our thighs when we walked, the bladderwort strong like the musk we sprayed in the air after PE, waltzed through as if to a lover, though it was into one another’s open arms where we shared a cherry Chapstick kiss before fixing the clips in each other’s hair, tucking away an exposed bra strap because girl-desire, like the river, was to be hidden.

Meghan felt safe in the gorge, we knew, because there was no cell service in the gorge, a safety increasingly rare as we bloomed each month: blood in the toilet, our breasts straining against our training bras, the boys creeping in like the wild all around, though they never looked us in the face. 

She even ate in the gorge, wild raspberries and Pringles. She said she ate her heart out for Mr. McDonnell who kissed like an eel but was better than the PE teacher or the gas station owner, which explained why she was suddenly team captain in class and always got extra ranch when we ordered mojo potatoes after school.

They were spears, she said that day, piercing a fry, glistening with grease and ranchy cream, through the air. She could just stab Fishy McDonnell who was picking up another girl now. Or her dad, who blubbered drunk on the phone to her mom and then passed out in the tub, his penis bobbing like a buoy in the water when Meghan had to retrieve him. She could stab the trout in the river, she said, looking below, pluck herself a rainbow from the darkness.

The truth was we knew Meaghan was drowning but no one dared to do a thing. How could we, when we knew a girl was just a body, an outline to fit ourselves into?

Meghan was sinking, arms flailing, right in front of us every day, but no one knew how to resuscitate someone who was still alive.

That’s when she leapt into the river. We screamed. We watched her charge  over the edge without looking back. Only when we peered down and watched her body resurface, Meghan waving to show us she was okay and had survived like always, did we mourn. Playing dead was the only time she was still, and the world was the same, her legs kicking frantically to keep her afloat.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.